The Human Is the Loop

The problem with writing, and something I am noticing lately, is that AI robs your ability to create prose in your style. Even if you use AI just a little bit to touch up your writing - you start being influenced - And over time it adds up - you start writing like AI just a little bit every now and then. It seems to be robbing me of my ability to create original prose.

Strategic thought is the other thing - like if I am deciding what we, as a company should focus on long term, it is easy for LLM's to give you a wrong direction. I think this is more because Strategic directions require a ton of context - and it is almost impossible for you to feed the ai EVERYTHING. There might be some things which are easy to miss out, which might make all the difference, and the LLM would assume that the 'requirements' are complete and would go to town with it. I suspect, this is largely because the current SOTA LLM's are being optimised for code and there isnt enough data in the training set for them to learn long term thought.

Coding is I think fine for me. But even there, I dont let the agent use memory at all. I create the context - and it runs from that only. The biggest unlock here is that I can now program in any language. And it frees up sometime to think in systems and come up with more robust architectures.

I only ever have 2-4 opencode/claude tabs open at once. And I use them for consistent tasks. There’s no way I’d be able to keep track otherwise. I have an “email reviewer” terminal, and a “doc maker” terminal, and 1-2 “coding” terminals.

But I don’t start a half dozen things simultaneously (which is ironic, because I have ADHD). I don’t feel the need to maximize my efficiency with AI. I also don’t lament the ideas / things I start but don’t finish; that has been my life, lol - see the aforementioned ADHD. So why should I start caring about my half-finished projects now, just because I sunk some tokens into them?

I spent an entire day the other day trying to use an LLM to help me automate something manual and tedious, and it was a failure. Did nothing but waste time in the end. Perhaps it’s those experiences (of which I’ve had plenty) that help me realize the limitations?

I don’t feel like it should make me more productive; it does, because I can offload random tasks that I do not have to be the one to do (“find the function where this happens” or “find all the laundromats in the cities I’m going to”) but I use it for research like that, and not so much “do my taxes for me.”

That’s why I paid a guy to do my taxes. I don’t feel this “need” for sending everything into AI. And just because I can use it to do anything myself… why should I?

There are two caveats:

1) when I’m directly working on something, I don’t want to leave it. I’m hyperfocused on it. But that’s true even without AI; I would have been obsessed with building doughflow.app were it for AI or not. The difference is I may never have finished it without AI.

2) I find myself using it as a crutch sometimes for simple things like sending a message to a colleague. I don’t like that, and have been trying to avoid it. I’ve spent all my life writing naturally, and I don’t need someone to proofread my chats. That’s a habit I am tossing, in general.

Perhaps it is the ADHD that actually helps me focus; that is, perhaps the coping mechanisms built for managing my countless disparate thoughts also work for managing multiple disparate agents? Just thinking out loud.

Or maybe it’s just keeping them in the work box - if someone wants to pay me to use LLMs and generate code, so be it. But keeping them away from hobbies, plans, art. Noble maybe, but then again there are a lot of projects I’m unlikely to do if I can’t find some way to make the level of effort required fit in with my lifestyle. With young kids, side project time is so incredibly limited.

Sometimes I feel like the main thing I’m learning from the AI wave is how modern life has a way of becoming more frustrating as more technology enters the picture. There’s all sorts of good in it, sure. But I do feel like so many more people are disgruntled by new tech compared to years past. I don’t think our cave man dopaminergic system is well suited for dealing with the expectations or availability of modern productivity and information.

Also, especially in work, it undermines skills and experience you then just lack. That also will only be fine as long as you are doing the work somewhere where they provide/allow use of LLMs.

Sometimes I'll get a neat little feature out while I feel inspired. This is great for doing something cool on a Sunday afternoon when priorities don't matter.

Sometimes I'll start something bigger and get halfway there, then I realise it's not what I should be doing, and it becomes another open tab that does not fit in my list of priorities.

Success depends on focus and saying no to most things. AI makes it easy to say yes to everything. Instead of making my todo list shorter, it just makes me add more stuff to it. It allows me to act on impulses instead of thinking carefully.

At the moment I'm getting most value out of: - Checking integrity of data through custom scripting - Controlling my smart home stuff via quick commands - Reconciling account software with my bank and uploaded / emails receipts - Researching info across disparate sources - Managing pipelines of work (eg sales cycles or content schedules) reminding me when I need to do something - Parsing interesting articles / videos and pulling out the essentials - Reworking text I've written to work across multiple social accounts - Asking me great questions about whether I'm on track with what I said I wanted to do - Pinging me when an email looks important so I don't have to continually check it. - Coding on projects that I want to make rapid progress on for work (not tinkering)

This list is quite different to the one I'd have written a year ago - that would have mostly been about writing, information retrieval and coding.

The most obvious use cases are I think the least useful ones. Diffusion of AI will take time!

This reflects my impression of working with LLM as well.

Some people reluctantly position themselves solely at the bottom or at the top.

This part resonates. AI has been such an accelerator that just yesterday I told Claude to make a brand new "Christian male meal planner with grace quotes from the Bible", bought a domain name, had the whole thing ready to go then thought "wtf am I doing, I already have half a dozen other side projects in the go, this is insane!" and just stopped it.

Human focus is a precious, finite resource. The productivity boom enabled by AI tools is probably going to benefit those capable of laser-like focus the most. Scattered thinkers (like myself, or perhaps the original article author) are in for a struggle at times.

More flour more water. More water more flour.

I don't think human should only judge AI design decisions described by LLMs in English. Understanding the codebase is important to be able to judge further development. So reading code, correcting code, articulating on it is still an important skill imo.

1) Read more books, 2) Learn more vocab, 3) Just write more!

Nothing crystalizes the thoughts coursing through our heads than writing something out - often times refining it - and forcing yourself to use new vocab that you have independently learned.

That’s why I found the final paragraph to be a bit of a shock - “ More important: it’s freeing me up to do human stuff like write and reflect right now.”

What? How? This doesn’t follow from the rest of the post at all. Maybe your new less frenetic and more human scale AI usage would be a good subject for the next post.

It's always looming in the mind of an overachiever-type person such as myself that 'AI could search and synthesize better', and so it has a very seductive siren song for almost all tasks.

The current moment with AI does very much feel like the early days of atomic energy where people had all kinds of now-crazy-seeming use-cases for the atom, and this showed up again with at-home microwaves, as seen in that "Microwave Cooking for One" book from the 1980s (see: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8m6AM5qtPMjgTkEeD/my-journey...).

I do think with new technologies it's important to try many different forms and applications of it before finding their true practical utility, and this is no different. Maybe we're collectively (at least within the HN crowd) finally feeling the "cool-down of the mania" and starting to shift to more realistic uses of AI (at least until there might be another big capabilities jump...)

But at the same time, I cannot deny that AI has also made me become a better person in other areas. I'd always had poor 'handiness' or 'around the house' type skills, and the number of things I've gotten comfortable doing because of AI assistance, like hanging art on the walls, taking on some basic at-home plumbing and fix-it tasks, trying new things in the kitchen with cooking and food prep and brewing coffee etc, is frankly much higher than pre-2022. And that's to say nothing of all the help it's provided getting more fit in the gym. Maybe my upbringing lacked these things that others never had an issue with, but I am grateful to this technology for helping 'level the playing field' in this regard. Just like I know how it's done the same for non-techie people who are now a little more well-versed in the matters that I'd been naturally more fluent in.

So, like most tech, we need to be mindful of our use, especially us HN-types that are drawn to information processing systems, optimization, efficiency, etc. It's really a double-edged sword, and I've never felt that more than lately. And this is doubly true for anyone with certain neurodiverse information habits (all the open tabs, 'research trails' with poor follow-up, etc). I often joke that I'll know we've reached AGI when my open browser tab count hovers below ~5!